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AdTech 2.0 – Building Experiences, Not Stacks

As platforms and capabilities commoditize, marketers need to vette their tech against a new set of standards – how they build customer experience. AdTech 2.0 starts with the relationships brands need to build throughout the supply chain – with publishers, with a networks of data and other providers, in order to create more seamless experiences for the customer. We will explore how T-Mobile is leaning into the supply chain to enforce greater transparency, interoperability and direct relationships with media and customers. What business cases can marketers build around richer customer experiences? How are platforms and partnerships being re-evaluated according their ability to power a more holistic set of goals and not just check the tech boxes?

Hi, I’m Evan Barocas – Director, Media Operations at T-Mobile where I support AdTech and Media Activation, really leaning into ‘How we buy media’. I started at T-Mobile 11 months ago as we began to transform how we bought and measured media. A part of that transformation was taking greater ownership over the technology we used to buy and measure media across all screens and mediums.

I am really excited to take you through our journey so far and then our AdTech and Platforms lead, Kellie Keehr, will sit down with Steve and talk more in-depth about how we’ve brought this to life.

I don’t need to tell all of you how complex and fragmented the AdTech ecosystem is. From Walled Gardens to Black Boxes to vertically integrated supply chains, it’s incredibly tough to put this all together and deliver a meaningful and consistent consumer experience.

By and large, consumers are not happy with the experience and advertisers for the most part know it.

Instead of focusing the problem, which is the bad experience, we’ve developed band-aids for the problems this complexity and fragmentation have created. Poor viewability and brand safety while buying a bit of fraud? – we’ve now got measurement and verification platforms. Undisclosed auction types? – we’ve now got DSPs with built in bid shading algorithms. Need scalable behavioral data that spans across all devices? – we’ve now got data aggregators with limitless scale.

We started to look at these problems as a leading indicator of the quality of the experience we had in market. We knew that these challenges weren’t the problem but a reflection of our ability to have clear line of sight between us and the consumer we are trying to engage with. We needed a new way of grounding our decision making around the technology and solutions we deployed.

We started with experience. At the end of the day, how we make people feel with our advertising is what matters. All of the technology and solutions need to be aligned to facilitating, measuring and ensuring a high quality experience.

So our team asked two questions internally at T-Mobile to help figure out exactly what AdTech we needed to deliver a great experience.

Inspired? Curious? It’s definitely not Harassed and Violated…

We then organized around that need and let that need serve as the paradigm from which we viewed potential solutions.

As an example, let’s say in order to make someone feel inspired we declare we need to be relevant. To be relevant, well we need the right data, we need the right creative, we need the right placements and we need to be able to measure if we were relevant so we can do more of that.

The question that then grounds our decision making process – which is reflected in the RFIs and RFPs we put into market for all of these capabilities – is ‘does this platform help us do relevancy better’.

As we evaluate the efficacy of a platform towards this need, we also have three guiding principles through which we ensure all platforms, and also the teams charged with deploying those platforms, are aligned.

If you do not know exactly how each AdTech platform you work with makes money, you do not have transparency and believe me, you need it. If you cannot control how your dollar is spent you can ensure that it won’t be towards the type of experience you need and want to create.

It’s the job of your platform partners to help you simplify the complexity – not add to it.

Relationships with adtech vendors, supply side platforms, publishers and agencies

Data is incomplete. We need to make decisions based on a combination of the data we do have and our judgement. But our judgement needs to be infused with a sense of empathy for the consumer.

We need to remember that we aren’t reaching numbers, we’re reaching people. We should only work with the partners who will treat consumers the same way T-Mobile does when they walk into one of our retail stores.